Interview: The greatest of the mall

Cathal Coughlan, refusenik genius of Irish rock, returns with his song cycle set in a shopping mall hell, writes Michael Ross

On the night of the July 7 bombings last year, Cathal Coughlan caught a bus from Kilburn in north London to the east of the city, where he lives. That morning, one of the Underground bombs had been detonated near his local station. As he travelled home, he was still unsettled.

“A guy on the bus got into a row with an African woman, a fundamentalist Christian,” says Coughlan. “She was telling him that belief in Allah was wrong. He became incensed, saying that it was okay to bomb anything in the West because of what’s happening in Palestine and Kashmir. That argument ended when she got off the bus.

“Then he started haranguing people, shouting, ‘I’m Al-Qaeda, I’m Al-Qaeda’. And nobody said a word. This on the night of the bombings. They didn’t even make eye contact, much less ring the police. And that’s London. You can piss on